Well, this is the most blatantly, problematically sexist strip I have seen Tom Batiuk put out since “What Women’s Lib doesn’t know won’t hurt them”. He has his newest nebbish highschool avatar say that it took him til the tenth grade to have girls for friends, and flat out say that he considers wimmin-folk a separate class from himself.

Bernie has been hanging out with Logan for at least three years now, and he didn’t consider her a friend? Instead he saw her as an ‘other.’ And not only as from a different group, but a group outright opposing his own.

The wording of this has a darker potential double meaning. Because it could indicate that there are in fact two camps on each side of these opposing groups. A male opposing camp and a female opposing camp. And how else is Logan different from Bernie? So we’ve got textual sexism on top of sub-liminal racism. I’m revoking Bernie’s ‘woke’ card.

For years I’ve been defending Tom Batiuk against claims of overt sexism. I honestly believed he just had a hard time writing and relating to women. But this one strip has me rethinking everything.

The “opposing female camp”? He’s a high school kid in 2019, not a pre-pubescent boy in 1959. This is straight out of “Leave It To Beaver”, minus the cynicism. Perhaps it’s time to just mercy-kill this new WHS generation and stick to the nursing home arcs.

Everything about Batiuk tells me that he does think of women as being opponents. After all, one of them denied that her rightful role was to drop everything to feed him milk and cookies as he read comic books with a smug smirk on his stupid, selfish and moronic face.

“I’m proud to call you my friend! I can’t help but be impressed by how you handled that situation! …The way you made some bland pronouncement in favor of something… Your diction that made your banal point all the more unwieldy and byzantine… How your stank shirt you always wear undercut the seriousness of what you were saying… Kudos! I’m proud to do… whatever it is you proposed we do!”

Man, I bet Batiuk really wanted to make these kids’ feelings resonate like those of the Parkland kids but when he tried he finally understood just how far out of his depth he was, and these strips are the uninspired result.

Yeah, was gonna say, you’re confused. That was white Logan that had her blog picked up by ABC. This actually makes sense as ABC’s reporting is at the level of a high school girl…heavy on gossip, made up stories and the like.